Data obfuscation- A great way to teach Facebook a lesson

No doubt Facebook is a great platform for networking and meeting very nice people from all over the world. But when the people behind the computers over at Facebook Inc. begin to see end users as cartoons that can be treated anyhow, then those users surely would need to tell Facebook their piece of mind.

We looked at some 6 killer tips to wean yourself off of Facebook. That is for those who would want to either eventually quit or cut down the number of hours they spend on the site. The recent calls for people to delete their Facebook accounts like the Quit Facebook Day campaign will at best be like a drop of teaspoon in the ocean. People may be pissed off by the actions of Zuckerberg, but not sure if they want to quit.

In steps the concept of data obfuscation. The dictionary defines the word obfuscation as “to obscure, to confuse, make unclear…” Instead of asking people to quit completely, it would rather be more effective and have far reaching repercussions if those users are encouraged to deliberately change their data.

Be on Facebook, but change your sex to female when you are male, divorced when your are happily married, have 48 children when in fact you are still in high school. Change all that data and more to abstract ones such that your friends know you are kidding but the servers that crawl such data do not have the brains to know!

Services like Facebook make money from the data you give them. That is what they can sell to advertisers. Obfuscate that data and all they are selling to those advertisers will be nonsensical info that makes the targeting of ads nigh impossible. Asking people to quit will sure not work or have any meaningful impact. There’s still 400 million people there that am not sure will willingly oblige leaving their farms or stop their mafia wars.